


Lizbob Supernatural Meta (season 1)

by lizbobjones



Series: Lizbob Supernatural Meta Collection [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Meta Essay, Non Fiction, archived from elizabethrobertajones blog
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-12 21:38:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 14,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16879665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: I have been writing a lot of meta for a long-ass time on Tumblr.





	1. Returning To Season 1 After Season 12 - We’re With Mary Now

The opening scene, the very first things on the screen, is Mary coming in with Dean, to where Sam's iconic crib is waiting for a fond goodnight. The boys might be the main character focus, but she's right there the first person moving and acting on screen, the very beginning of the show.

We’re here WITH Mary now… It’s so much worse. 

I’m enjoying this family scene in a particularly weird, vivid way where I’ve yelled so much at these characters I’m waiting for baby Sammy to whip out a lore book when the creepy stuff starts happening in his room and have some trap ready, Sunny Baudelaire style.

And now for the first time, as I said, we’re here WITH Mary, not FOR Mary.

I sort of need to remember not just that they’re all sort of innocent in a way (John especially because this is where he breaks and stops being the man Mary remembers marrying and mourns, whatever prosaic relationship difficulties they were having…) but that this is their mythology more than just a first establishing scene, with the way their narrative has run.

This whole opening scene especially up to Mary’s death is almost unreal, because it’s the Winchesters depicted before they were anything else than this generic family about to be hit by a mysterious tragedy, even if there was always more to come on their development, historically as well. Like, 1x09 makes it pretty clear Mary was always going to have a bigger role than JUST being fridged, although never until season 12 a way which broke out of the crappiness of said trope.

I suppose Mary’s living the 1st version of “I didn’t make the deal” which is total denial, but it’s about to happen anyway. She gets to tap the light like she has no clue what it might mean and sleepily forget that demons are a thing (if this is even a POV on the story that has her knowledge in it - if it’s how John or Dean or Sam or all of them collective *imagine* this moment to have happened with the info they know).

But assuming it IS Mary’s POV since the camera is following her, she has a harsh reminder the world is not what it seems - literally because she mistook Azazel for John. The next version of “I didn’t make the deal” is 2x20 from Dean’s POV unaware of the cosmic drama that would have sprung from it, and Mary can only exist in it by being an oblivious object who has no idea what she didn’t do. And in the 3rd version it literally didn’t happen and a real AU sprung from that… Anyway the moment here where she’s in suspended animation and has been since 1973 as she’s been given the terms and conditions by Azazel that she can have her peace, in exchange for ignorance of what he might do to Sam.

She’s living as if she never made the deal. And we know how bad that AU is where she truly didn’t, now, and in the here and now, we know she’s going to die. There’s an immediate theme which isn’t obvious in this first scene on a first watch because duh you need to get to season 4, but coupled with going straight to Sam living the life in denial in Stanford with the exact same drama about to play out with Jess looming over him, we have an immediate connection between Sam and Mary (or Sam and John as it’s played before we know all the facts) that puts his first adult choices right next to Mary’s decision when similarly trying to run away and make her own life.

I don’t think it’s her fault, really, that she dies here - especially as the way it’s treated by Sam and Dean later is telling her not to get out of bed etc and the terms of her deal. It’s essentially a horrible accident and yet one that needed to happen and probably was no accident (obviously not agreeing it “needed” to on a critical level) because cosmically, this universe has no place for mothers.

(Insert brief interlude wondering if Rowena appearing as the Awful Mother did manage to start prying open cracks for motherhood to reappear in the grand narrative, especially since Rowena was the means by which Amara was released, and later Amara and Rowena hung out, and Amara had the two families to compare - the MacLeods vs the Winchesters as she made her call on that Dean needed Mary most… which I think is thematically something they always played with since starting to mention the extended MacLeod family from Crowley, e.g. 6x04 starting to flesh out that Crowley had the Worst Father/Son relationship with Gavin in a fairly heavily saturated chunk of episodes about fathers/parenthood as season 6 rebuilt some themes. Including by replaying this very moment in the nursery but with Dean, Lisa and Ben. This show loops around on itself so much it makes me dizzy.)

Anyway, this scene is like, this is how the story goes. And it creates everything that needs to be broken out of later. There’s the musing if Sam is old enough to throw a ball around yet - and Sam’s younger brother status, the weird feeling he carries of that, not being allowed to do things yet (8x23 especially has him crash and burn on this, but season 4 is equally Sam rebelling against this dynamic deliberately to completely different results and personal growth)… It’s addressed to Dean as if he is the arbitrator of whether Sam is old enough yet, and in 12x22 it does play out that Sam steps forward but Dean also steps back - mutual recognition of Sam’s growth and ability to put himself forward. And of course that episode dealing with elements from 5x16 which is like the midpoint between 1x01, and 12x22 as the 3 big episodes dealing with The Family Myth, and not just the history, but this specific story. Mary at home Before, and breaking down the walls built up around it. Challenging her image, not just that she might be more human than saint per the flashbacks, but that even the saint image in its most pristine form when Mary acted as The Mother is not a sacred space.

I feel like the way this scene is presented to us, especially if the show did know Mary was at least going to know more than she let on all along (hence the cut away from her walking in on Azazel to skip her “You!” they may have always planned, as it is an abrupt cut leaving them plenty of room to decide if Mary said or did anything about Yellow Eyes), it IS the mythology version. The reason WHY it all happens, told to us as the fairy tale in the way Dean might grow up hearing this horrible story, remembering his part of it in vivid detail. He and John barely have any info to go on as we follow Mary’s POV for most of it, but obviously Dean already knows this vividly and instinctively because he may not have seen Mary’s death, but his reaction to Jess’s is of one who knows exactly what happened to his mom.

I have a lot of thoughts about their story beginning where it does as they come out of stasis as the demons decide to start pushing things into action. Their reasoning is simply that Sam was getting too complacent and too out of the life here, so everything hinges on Sam being so happy and content - that crossroads of his life where he seems to have it all, just as Mary had grown contented with her family life, and had the prerequisite number of children to start the apocalypse, became a tool that via her death would shove her family onto the revenge path that would fill them with anger and a need to learn about the supernatural, if she would not raise her family as hunters.

Likewise, Sam has the training despite all the attempts to protect him from everything by John and Dean, and his own sense of normality he craves and aims for, and has managed to build. The demons want him angry and unstable because season 4 was always what they were aiming for. So showing Sam happy and with job and romance stuff going his way blissfully, he’s now in that place where it can all be taken away from him and fill him with rage. I just watched 10x12 and it’s kinda like… he needed fattening up before he was ready to eat. Let him have the normality to give him something to lose, and make him lose it and know that extra pain that never having it doesn’t bring, because it makes him that much more delicious when you count the layers of trauma he’s got. Hence, second fridging, “all for narrative symmetry”.

And of course John has been hunting in a kind of way of doing the job while looking for/waiting for a break in the case, which has become HIS stasis for the 22 years since Mary’s death, waiting for what he needs to avenge her. And he will drop everything and leave the mantle of the REAL job not the revenge mission to Dean - the sequence ends with John sitting on the Impala, holding his boys and the pan in on his face as you can see he’s not mourning - he’s swearing vengeance. And for him the intervening time is just waiting for his chance to snap. And the hunting is not who he is, just something he does, while he will raise his sons as hunters, with the death of their mother as an angsty origin story but to have the “saving people hunting things” deal as their main life goal, an endless job that can carry them far far beyond avenging Mary and surviving the revenge arc which normally ends as badly for the avenging character as the one they set out to kill…

Dean is portrayed as having gone along with him all this time hunting, and Sam sees Dean and John almost as a unit, from his perspective as not understanding John’s abandoned the job and Dean’s “picking up where he LEFT OFF” - 1x10 and 1x11 especially have a lot to say about Sam’s sense of Dean bossing him around and not thinking for himself, but for Dean the sense of his character looking at him from Sam’s eyes in this first season is always that he was in on it when Sam wasn’t, he was the one following in John’s footsteps, knowing too much, protecting Sam, and that all goes back to “take your brother outside as fast as you can - don’t look back.” Dean has his life irrecoverably changed by this order, because he doesn’t look back, and metaphorically he doesn’t put Sam down again, until much much later, again 12x22 showing he is capable of doing it (although I think fairly early on Dean was trying to trust Sam, it just… got all messed up by the Carver era codependency stuff. But I THINK 12x22 was a symbolic gesture for the way things had been changing and their growing ability to do stuff like this…) But “take your brother outside” is his core trauma in the codependency, tracing right back to John’s order here whenever Dean kneejerk over-protects.

And Mary? We’re seeing what is literally moments before she ends up in a park in 2016 with a grown-ass Dean poking her - the surreality of watching season 12 and skipping back here is the reverse of how Mary felt to skip ahead in the box set. She was in a very literal stasis - 1x09 shows her as a ghost, which puts her in stasis with unresolved things from life so this theme is present in season 1 but of course that is the last time we communicate with ACTUAL Mary in the ongoing continuity, despite seeing Sam Smith’s face all the time in the early seasons up to 6, and some chances to get to know her while she was younger in the time travel episodes. Still, as a character, Mary is in the same stasis either as a ghost or in Heaven, where pointedly nothing happens to you but peace for eternity, which I think you can apply to all of the rest of them until we get to know them as the show starts up. Mary gets essentially punted ahead to season 12, and for her the story starts again, at long last. And 1x01 is fresh trauma again in the show, and so we get episodes like 12x03 which deal with it for her, and a season long mytharc about yellow eyes and nurseries and demon babies, the scars on Mary’s psyche from this one moment here.

It’s awfully painful to go back to this scene, and see it from Mary’s eyes, not just as an act of empathy to a character who had no agency the entire time she was in the story as I used to, but as the backstory and origin of a character whose story began 11 years later than the rest of her family.


	2. You Think Mom Would Have Wanted This For Us?

SAM  
Yeah, I know, but still. The way we grew up, after Mom was killed, and Dad's obsession to find the thing that killed her.

DEAN glances outside.

SAM  
But we still haven't found the damn thing. So we kill everything we  _can_  find.

DEAN  
We save a lot of people doing it, too.

A pause.

SAM  
You think Mom would have wanted this for us?

DEAN rolls his eyes and slams the door open.

Okay this one has been done to death, mostly in the context of laughing at the new irony of what season 12 brought… The “mom is never coming back” sentiment later in this episode got some mileage too.

But hey, I’m thinking a lot more about 12x14 and how Mary and Sam talked there -

Mary: Sam, I messed up. I know I messed up. But what the British Men of Letters are doing, this is bigger than us, Sam. We’ve got a real shot here.  
Sam: Shot at what?   
Mary: A world without monsters. A world where you and Dean don’t have to hunt, where you can have normal lives.  
Sam: I chose this life.  
Mary: I know. But you were going to school, to college. And I get why you gave it up. But what if you didn’t have to? What if there was a different future for you, for us? That’s why I’m doing this. That is what I’m fighting for. I am not trying to recruit you, but you need to know. Things are changing. Please. Just let me show you.

The “world without monsters” refrain ended up being the word that got into her head in the same way “I did what I had to do” poisoned season 9 for Dean on his descent, but hey. At this point they are free to believe that Mary hadn’t the faintest idea they could even BE hunters, but I would guess after 4x03/5x13 the fandom of the time had some fun with this comparison in the first iteration of it being made ironic with later canon… (The show looping and looping and looping back around themes and ideas, and season 1 and this episode especially putting so much on the board for later. No they had no idea the above exchange would ever be said, but it’s all in here to collect depth later…)

I like this especially because Sam has the idealistic view of Mary, that he has no idea who she is but he has faith that she wouldn’t want this because he believes she’s truly good and loves them. In season 12 he’s similarly in a position of letting her in just because she’s there. That’s good enough for Sam - getting to know her however, and finding out who she really is. That speech in 12x14 bares her motives to Sam and though she’s spouting the brainwashy lies of the BMoL, SHE believes in them and she’s doing it for Sam, so he doesn’t have to be a hunter. He still wants to be and the rest of the episode makes it clear it’s his vocation, but I think in a way just letting him have the vindication that Mary truly did not want this life for him… Sam has his faith dashed all the time along the way when it comes to God and angels and Heaven… But Mary’s speech here proves that however Sam has grown out of it, he wasn’t WRONG at least.

Considering Dean’s the one who suffers with reconciling her image in season 12, Sam’s simplistic way of thinking about her with sweet, certain faith is less toxic to his own understanding of her, since he has the overall more healthy approach to her return and is only denied growth with her because of her OWN angst about what she did to him that drives her away. As I’ve said elsewhere, Sam’s sort of at peace with her since season 5 because it was all tangled up in his MAIN original inner peace arc which really concluded in 5x22 but was a notable thing in 6 & 7 and anyway his trauma has all moved way way past the demon blood arc, even if it left scars, it doesn’t hurt him in the same way, and in 12x04 he got to talk to Magda about it in a way that was positive as well.

I really like this moment now, tbh, thinking about Sam in particular. Obviously Dean’s going through a ton of other stuff himself, struggling with what Sam believes and agreeing but disliking mentions of Mary and disliking Sam using her memory against him. But Sam’s idealism in Mary is maybe not so much of a thing because he so rarely gets much about her in the early part of the show. I think 4x21 has this sort of thing twisted completely around on him, using Mary as a validating figure to sooth his conscience but he makes her into what he needs, wrapped up in a version of his mother that’s bloodstained with what HE feels is something he’s to blame for (while she feels at blame for what happened to him) and yet can still tell him he’s doing the right thing.

I suppose later in season 12 and especially this part where they come back to this line and what Mary wants for them, Sam can see it as a flawed idea of what’s good for them coming from Mary, and reject it softly by saying he’s already been raised a hunter and is okay with that. His speech about the natural order, mimicking Eve’s speech in 6x19 (that episode where she took Mary’s face, of course), also puts it out quite clearly that he has a place and an understanding of his life that’s entirely evolved from running away or guilt or getting dragged along in the job because he had to. One thing that I do like about season 8 and Sam stopping hunting is that he literally is never ever given a real choice to stop between this moment here and hitting the dog. Dean hardly is either, but at least he gets between season 5 & 6 and is considering what endgame looks like from 3x02 onwards in a way where Sam can’t even begin to think about it except as something he thought he had and was lost. Anyway, it absolves Mary quietly of having any real say in whether Sam is a hunter or not - and I find him fascinating because he’s evolved as a character in pretzels in a way where Dean has at least been on a rollercoaster with ups and downs but all at least going forwards…

So another little thing from the pilot that I feel season 12 dealt with in an interesting way, and of course I’m not trying to end up giffing and talking about all the things that make me think of Sam & Mary, but over the whole season it was the dynamic that fascinated me the most. There’s a lot of messed up crap in there :P


	3. Saving People Hunting Things - Sam and Dean’s dynamic

1x02:

I want to talk about the whole saving people hunting things speech and its philosophy - both then and now.

Dean goes over to comfort Sam after Sam snaps at Roy in a way where it seemed like Dean was going to snap at him, even using the same “you don’t hunt real monsters” POSING that Dean was doing. Dean was just peacocking, Sam FELT it and lashed out with it, and then he’s sitting there and Dean’s like, “I’m supposed to be the belligerent one” - yes, SUPPOSED TO BE, already setting down his roles and casting himself in a light against Sam where we get their parallels where if one is one thing than the other has to be a direct opposite duality of that, which of course is something the Chuck and Amara dynamic eventually ended up mirroring just as an example of how their dynamic echoes through the show.

These lines got to me so much just as an introduction to  _why_ they're having this conversation in the first place and Dean’s still sitting down next to Sam:

> DEAN  
>  You wanna tell me what’s going on in that freaky head of yours?  
>  SAM  
>  Dean—  
>  DEAN  
>  No, you’re not fine. You’re like a powder keg, man, it’s not like you. I’m supposed to be the belligerent one, remember?

Like Sam seeing through Dean saying he can’t do this alone, and seeing the vulnerability Dean had in the previous episode to do with all his big themes, Dean won’t let Sam say he’s fine (he does twice in the previous episode, to Jess before he leaves and Dean at the end)… Sam is the original Winchester to use “fine” this way and he is a master of repression and burying things down and moving on… But here he’s still learning to get hurt this way. He’s obviously showing that he’s not fine for the entire episode - it opens on him not being fine and Dean seeing through it. But Dean calls it out here, in a mirror to Sam calling out his attempt to blow off needing actual human contact instead of being stoic and able to do anything on his own without getting lonely or needy. (Dean is so needy. It’s a good trait, honestly. He would hate to hear it but… In his life?)

Dean has this idea of their dynamic - I think it’s important the show essentially restarts their relationship after time away, and I think the length of the show IS their meaningful relationship. They shared stuff and were both brothers and the miserable parent/child dynamic in the past, and of course they have memories of stuff together, but the gap comes right at a critical age for Sam especially. Right as he is hitting adulthood and can begin an adult relationship with Dean that will stop him thinking of Sam as a kid, and let them maybe begin to make things equal, he leaves. 1x01 is the first time they see each other after that, and it’s a long gap with head-clearing space and now they’re both adults and Dean at least when it comes to the job and respecting Sam as a hunter and so on, lets him be an adult. And his advice here is somewhat protective because he cares and he’s a protective mother bear, but he speaks to Sam as an adult and lets him choose to stay as an adult. So I think it’s a good start over…

And it’s really interesting to me that Dean has ideas of what their dynamic is or should be. That he is belligerent and Sam is sweet and well-mannered (well, he can be, but Dean might act crude or whatever to break the tension but he’s likewise perfectly capable of being kind, and this VERY SCENE approaches Sam as a concerned friend and it’s extremely honest about their feelings on both sides when it comes to revenge and the job.) Anyway Dean’s ideas of what they are/who they’re supposed to be runs counter to the facts, and the way Sam blows up at Roy in the way Dean was only poking him I think shows Dean was kind of just needling him not for his own ego, while Sam is genuinely furious with him. It looks like the same thing on the surface, but Roy does save Dean from the bear trap and as sour a face as Dean makes about that, he has to concede Roy is a decent woodsman and passed a test, even if they think he’s a liability for monsters… Sam, though, flips on him and nearly tells him it’s a wendigo (*takes a shot*) and Dean has to stop HIM from blurting everything, like Roy stopped him stepping on the trap. Something kind of telling that Dean had a surface level reaction to Roy but Sam really deeply FELT it. I don’t think Dean would ever LIKE Roy but I feel that outward bitterness aside, he would respect him after the bear trap thing, and even in the first place, he’d had more of a need to dance around Roy sizing him up, mentally, as someone else acting like an authority figure when Dean often assumes the leadership role and in this case genuinely knows more about what they’re hunting, but not about the woods.

And, to move on at last, it always gets me how much this is a confession:

> SAM  
>  Dad’s not here. I mean, that much we know for sure, right? He would have left us a message, a sign, right?  
>  DEAN  
>  Yeah, you’re probably right. Tell you the truth, I don’t think Dad’s ever been to Lost Creek.  
>  […]  
>  DEAN  
>  This book. This is Dad’s single most valuable possession—everything he knows about every evil thing is in here. And he’s passed it on to us. I think he wants us to pick up where he left off. You know, saving people, hunting things. The family business.

This is their same fight from 1x01 but approached in a way they can work through the emotions and Dean can get Sam on board with John being gone by giving him something real to deal with. Sam always does this thing where he doesn’t want to do a hunt but he goes along with it in a token way, but he’s such a sharp brilliant hunter he ends up applying himself really well to it anyway. Like in the delete scene for this episode, he’s already gone and found the petroglyphs that suggest it’s a wendigo and was therefore engaging in this hunt despite being upset about dead ends on revenge and finding John and angrily resisting it being a case earlier.

Dean confesses like he’s known all along John isn’t there, like he’s breaking it gently to Sam. Sam got rather dragged along on the hunt last time - he was forced to by Dean being arrested, and then Constance even goes and takes over the car, to prove further than Sam is being taken on a ride really when it came to the hunt, even if he had some input on solving it. But this time he has a one track mind and has walked her all by himself. Dean, though, took on the burden last episode, taking the journal and finishing the hunt John left behind, and he’s perfectly content to keep following orders for breadcrumb trails (or… M&M trails) of where to go next and what is expected of them. John has ABANDONED the job (“left off” Dean says, when they know he’s purposefully left things behind to go on his revenge mission. John isn’t a hunter any more in the sense of taking cases and HELPING people. He’s ONLY out to get Azazel, and his sons have a coming of age here to go into his shoes… And Dean KNOWS it and knew that this was going to be a job, this was how it was going to be now, and was probably waiting until they were deep in the woods where Sam couldn’t exactly leave to break it to him that yeah it’s exactly what it looks like…)

After that he offers the inspirational hero idea of what they do to entice Sam over to working peacefully. I think it’s an interesting combination of this being portrayed as the right way over revenge, but Dean’s issues with being a loyal son are all messed up in it, which Sam sees often as too much of the motivation, and bounces off that back onto the revenge thing in their ongoing arguments…

I like, though, that while Sam is complicated and doing the angsty main character manpain main arc thingy, Dean has his own traditional heroic ideals - the sort of thing that when you strip him right down, it’s NOT because John made him do it, but he earnestly believes it. In 12x11 he forgets who he is, and that last list of important people in his life has Sam, Cas and Mary, but no mention that John raised him or whatever. He hunts instinctively. But though it’s through killing, it’s heroic motivations - bone deep interest in feeling like he should go help, that he’s needed somewhere, and when he gets into the conflict, to protect the one he sees as innocent… And yeah, Dean truly, utterly believes it when he explains what their life is, what this job entails… What good he gets to do and who he does it for, and it IS for random humanity. Dean immediately is Dean “Humanity” Winchester. In season 8, Dabb killing Tommy off for making the point that Crowley is undermining their life work, is very much about this being the exact thing which Dean made the speech for that defines his entire life. He can repeat it to Mary in 12x01, in a similar scenario to this one (but so different) and callbacks to 1x02 happened so much in season 12 I honestly had a moment of madness earlier that, as the second of the season it was a Dabb episode, but he definitely likes going back to it.


	4. Wendigo vs Purgatory

Something I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone talk about - 

In Wendigo where they’re trying to get the civilians to safety, Haley dig in her heels and says,

 

> HALEY  
>  Stop. Stop it. Everybody just stop. Look. Tommy might still be alive. And I’m not leaving here without him. 

I think this episode more than any others actually has a Purgatory vibe to it about the MotW - that same sort of trees everywhere, lost in a dangerous wilderness with a monster thing…

Obviously Haley is talking about her brother here, but I don’t think that necessarily undermines the romantic parallel of Dean saying the exact same thing to Cas (in the Dabb episode in a season he book ends for his work by killing off Tommy in 8x22) mostly because this was a very simple hunt and a very simple rescue. There’s no way Tommy would have wanted to stay, while the similar line is forced out of Dean when Cas is so unwilling to leave.

And of course Dean does consider Cas family and under that broad umbrella, moments like this where you insist on staying for family are important (also this is pretty early days in their later dynamic where the writing plays with pretty intentional looking romantic subtext for their entire arc). In 12x12 they all insist on staying for Cas, and it feels like the entire family will fight and die for him.

In contrast 8x02 is a personal conversation (Benny standing to the side judging them aside :P) and it’s all messed up and backwards that Cas doesn’t want to come back because that pulls in layer after layer of their relationship dynamic, Dean’s sense that Cas abandoned him, all that they tentatively rebuilt in season 7 seeming to be threatened except that Dean digs in and refuses to let go, because, well, you don’t. You can’t even imagine that family would stay behind and not want to be rescued, to the point of remembering it wrong and taking on the blame, because, surely not…

Anyway, when you look back at Haley trying to rescue her brother (Haley who Dean massively empathises with because they’re both in the woods looking for missing family and answers, and she’s clearly the caretaker to a younger brother on top of that), it is so much simpler, obviously because at the time it’s the 2nd episode and echoing the most simple mirrors of their family dynamic as everything gets set up.

Running it through the filter of Cas adds so much more to it it’s really only borrowed dialogue said in a similar setting, but used as an emotional appeal - one that gets rejected, because it’s always more complicated than just an easy to process sibling dynamic.


	5. Dean and Roy in Wendigo, an under-appreciated moment of Dean vs Authority Figures

**1x02 - Dean vs Roy**

Everyone gifs the bit in 1x01 where he gets thrown over the hood of the car as the definitive start point to prove Dean’s always kinda been like this since the start… I still get very amused by this instance…

> DEAN  
> Roy, you said you did a little hunting.
> 
> ROY  
> Yeah, more than a little.
> 
> DEAN  
> Uh-huh. What kind of furry critters do you hunt?
> 
> ROY  
> Mostly buck, sometimes bear.
> 
> DEAN passes ROY.
> 
> DEAN  
> Tell me, uh, Bambi or Yogi ever hunt you back?
> 
> ROY grabs DEAN. SAM looks on.
> 
> DEAN  
> Whatcha doing, Roy?

 

I’m gonna quote [me from 2 years ago](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/119939645043/spn-hellatus-rewatch-1x02-hello-i-was-going-to-do) because nothing really substantially changes about this moment except that I always wanted a gifset of it and had no idea the power to make it was in my hands the entire time…

> Pfft Dean. Dean Dean Dean. We are  _two_  episodes in and you are making things weird and uncomfortable.
> 
> Yes, let’s posture about hunting monsters and make fun of the guy for  _only_  hunting deer and bears (to be honest Roy seemed to be paying zero attention to Dean’s attempts to assert himself as alpha male hunter of the group), and then when he grabs Dean to stop him standing in the bear trap, he gets really up in his face instead of actually looking around to assess the danger. Nope, you are way too in deep in whatever game you (and only you) were playing there… I mean, I don’t even think this is like sexual tension or whatever, except that Dean had a weird reaction to Roy from the start because of him being a competent woodsman, and Dean is… not. And then he sort of assumes because he’s been angling for a fight that this is Roy snapping and asserting dominance over him, so the feathers go up and Dean’s like I’m just going to stare you down with all this weird one-sided chemistry between us boiling over. And Roy is totally oblivious because he’s the bigger guy.
> 
> Dean is basically a small yapping puppy at this point in the show.

I suppose you could fill in some more blanks about missing father figures and how Dean’s both going into the woods to search for John (but also knows before they even get there that he won’t be there and it’s going to be another job) and reacting to Roy this way because as a competent hunter (in his own field, which pisses Dean off because he knows that’s nothing compared to hunting the actual, dangerous monsters, which makes him a hero and Roy a dude who shoots Bambi on his weekends…) Roy is kind of the John mirror in the party in a way. A bad one, to Dean.

Of course Dean’s reaction is immediately to try and usurp his place - because Dean has now taken on the burden of being the hunter John never really was, the one who puts “saving people, hunting things” as his top priority, talking Sam out of going on the same revenge mission that he’s lost John to already…

… But in that way where Dean does this sort of thing, of course there’s a ridiculous amount of  momentary tension (pretty much all radiating from Dean’s side of things) towards this guy where you can’t tell if he wants to kill him or fuck him.


	6. 1x03 - Dean’s Happy Place, or How Dean and Diner and Bar Staff Shape His Psyche

****

****

**1x03 - Dean’s happy place**

I just love seeing this little glimpse of Dean doing the job as he does in perfect harmony with the universe or whatever. I mean, in season 1 they’re burdened, sure, but this is STILL somehow the most un-burdened we see Dean.

After seeing Sam in 1x01 living a quick sample for us of how his life had been going, and in 1x02 going into a case immediately where their desires for where to go NEXT were conflicted, this time we see Dean alone, eating diner food, drinking coffee, and sketchily circling and crossing out obituaries right there in the middle of a diner and not even having the mood killed to flirt with Wendy the impossibly hot waitress.

I mean none of it is a healthy home cooked meal, a normal job, or anything more than the potential for a fleeting connection hooking up with her rather than starting anything serious. But this is the little happy space that Dean has made for himself. I imagine if we saw some versions of his Heaven which were blatantly biased towards emotional manipulation to himself or Sam and serving main arc nonsense, there would be diners and waitresses (and you know, probably a hot waiter or two).

What this reminds me of especially is 2 scenes - chronologically, the deleted scene from 10x23:

and Dean and Carmen in 12x18 which was the most recent diner thing like this.

  


In 10x23 it’s quite specifically a dream Dean made for himself, a happy place to go hide from what he’d done, but Cas invades it with his guilt and a subtextual admission to himself he knows Cas loved him and he broke that trust (he has an admirer). And Crowley, who walks in as himself to go see how Dean’s doing and if he wants to be Crowley’s consort of Hell yet. The bartender is really just there to flirt with Dean, have tits, and point out Cas, aka what Dean really wants and is hiding from (it makes her walk away and leave him to his subtextual homoerotic love triangle). 

Crowley points out the bar is unsatisfactory, in a parallel to 9x11, the start of their bromance, and where Crowley also uses a description of the bar right down to the VDs present to assure Dean’s it not what he wants, and to inform him Gadreel is long gone… And there was some suggestive subtext between Dean and Gadreel which really didn’t go very far because, duh, vessel problems like woah for most of their interaction. But it’s implied by Metatron that Gadreel has a soft spot for Dean paralleled to Abner (when Metatron complains about killing your darlings and then sends him on that quest to murder his boyfriend and yeah thanks Dabb I’m taking this all at face value because you never took it back :P) never mind the heaps of queer subtext all over Gadreel in general (which also for like, one time only, bounces onto human!Cas especially in 9x06, and Cas doesn’t get queer subtext in the same way normally, he usually just *is*)

Anyway that’s all a mahoosive tangent powered by my rewatch of season 9, so if you’re curious about any part of that, my weird rewatching tag is on this post so it’s not hard to find the relevant extremely lengthy posts which lay out this web if you scroll back to season 9 (which is still kinda near the top >.>)

To get back to Dean’s crushes on serving staff… So 10x23′s bar and bartender is conjured up, and she’s probably a good memory from somewhere or other (to roughly paraphrase what he tells Suzy (“Carmelita” - similar to Carmen in sound)) in 9x08… In 12x18 we just had the “Carmen” thing to go on to invoke all the djinn dream stuff, which I have also written about in exhaustive detail about both [2x20](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/146708762873/elizabethrobertajones-im-really-quite-fond-of) and [6x01](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/130232794973/i-think-id-like-to-take-you-up-on-that-beer).

(At this point I don’t remember which comes first in my web of interconnected bi!Dean posts but I think ironically the season 6 one does if you want to follow the train of thought)

Anyway that’s my brief philosophy (lol) on Dean and these sort of escapist relationships, which I won’t repeat here but the tl;dr is Lisa = djinn dream because Carmen, and Carmen = season 2 gay panic manifestation of wish for a heteronormative uncomplicated life, and then you look at Lisa again through THAT lens.

Obviously I don’t have some sort of weird bias of thinking all of Dean’s heterosexual relationships and fantasies are made up dreams or things he enforces on himself/has enforced on him by compulsory heterosexuality, because this scene alone back in season 1, establishing Dean’s sort of happy space and calm is a moment like this and a waitress like that which echoes up and down the show in various ways in the same way Carmen does - the 2x20 one. Dean really freakin’ digs Wendy.

The 12x18 instance of Dean flirting and hooking up with diner staff LINKS Wendy and djinn!Carmen so I feel like Dabb’s given us a puzzle piece which does something quite utterly ridiculous here by turning this moment into a sort of defining instance in Dean’s sexuality as shown on screen as what is called back to as a DREAM and by now haunted, unsatisfying thing going forwards however much it once was Dean’s life and the happiest moments he got, allowing me to ramble about all these diverse subjects and make it Destiel and bi!Dean and… everything. Dean’s smile here at Wendy is frickin everything.

Kinda fitting that she’s wearing a key necklace ;)


	7. Dean Is So Smol In Phantom Traveller, or Watch Those Daddy Issues Settle On His Shoulders

I love the way after Dean hears John’s answerphone he pulls his jacket that much closer around his shoulders on the way to the car. It’s just really nicely symbolic of him knowing John put that burden on him even more and made it absolutely official that the job was now Dean’s, and everything that entailed.

One of the major themes I adore following the progression of through season 1 is the way John forces the family business onto Dean, and the ways in which Dean responds to that, including some dramatic statements a few episodes from here that he admires how Sam can think for himself. Of course, Sam as the younger brother is in that position where traditionally in the more regressive of patriarchy and family dynamics, the elder son inherits the father's business and is the one raised up to this position of responsibility, while younger sons traditionally could choose to help the family business as a partner or had the freedom to do other things - in cases of land being an issue in the inheritance the youngest sons were forcibly shoved out to church positions etc where they would be given a living, but seconds sons pursuing law is actually a historical trope.

And this makes a situation where in season 1 John has embodied and modelled his "family business" in such a way that Dean is being given the burden of it with complete societal expectation that this is his duty, even though of course to hunters there's no organised society to enforce that, just the strong walls which are between John and Dean and the exhausting load he gives him to carry.

John has already left Dean the journal, and Dean took the jacket for himself as he’s quite willingly accepting the job in some ways (as 1x02 showed)… But it has a weight on his shoulders still, and it’s more personal. In this episode Sam is the one who finds the exorcism in the journal and uses it to DO the exorcism while Dean’s freaking out about being on a plane. This episode reminds us Sam can be a perfectly competent hunter and they should be considered equals at it when sharing their strengths… In some ways this episode is about Sam's strengths and showing clearly that he has a strong and equal contribution to the brother dynamic by deliberately putting Dean in a compromised state on the plane where Sam therefore gets to exert more confidence and control (something episodes like Yellow Fever, About A Boy or Regarding Dean also give Sam)

But Dean is the one wearing this jacket, and carrying the emotional subplot about John’s expectations. So this little gesture is a great subtle thing here. He hears the answer phone message and 4 episodes in of chasing John and being somewhat uncertain of what role they have to play, John now clarifies for Dean that yes, everything like finding the journal really was me abandoning my part of the job, the positive, healthy, saving people side, and leaving it all to you. And Dean gets up to head to the car, and tugs on his (John's) jacket to make it sit that much more snugly on his shoulders. 


	8. Mary and Sam in 1x09 and How That Is Basically Season 12

 

 

> DEAN: Sam? Sam! [He finds SAM. As he looks at the fire figure, he raises his gun.]
> 
> SAM: No, don’t! Don’t!
> 
> DEAN: What, why?!
> 
> SAM: Because I know who it is. I can see her now.
> 
> [Suddenly, the fire vanishes. Instead, standing in front of them is Mary Winchester, exactly as she was the night she died. DEAN’S expression softens. In shock, he lowers his gun slowly.]
> 
> DEAN: [softly] Mom? [MARY smiles and steps closer to him.]
> 
> MARY: Dean. [Tears form in DEAN’S eyes. MARY walks away from him and goes to SAM. DEAN watches her, never taking his eyes off her.] Sam. [SAM smiles weakly, crying. His mother’s smile fades.] I’m sorry.
> 
> SAM: For what? [She looks at him sadly, but says nothing. She walks away from them and looks up at the ceiling.]
> 
> MARY: You get out of my house. And let go of my son. [Once again, she bursts into flames. When she is entirely engulfed, the fire reaches the ceiling and disappears. The force holding SAM to the wall is released. He walks over to DEAN, and the two of them look at each other, stunned.]
> 
> SAM: Now it’s over.

**1x09**

She can’t say it here, whether it’s a ghost thing (they’re not great at expressing their feelings and having development that moves them forward - the whole point is they’re STUCK) or just Mary… Because in season 12 she CAN express it, despite having no memory of this incident and trying once before…   
I know I’m sort of repeating myself here, but this one little moment to me is the pin in the *entire* season 12 emotional arc for Mary, and everything she does. All goes back to this point, like they went to the one time in the whole show before season 12 and after she dies where she was *any* sort of her own character, and took how she felt there and turned it into a whole season of content, and in this context I think the fact she turns her back on Sam and can’t tell him why she is sorry is basically the main thing that they lifted to develop her arc and bring her around to getting absolved for it.

She can say it to Dean in 12x02:

> MARY: And when we do find Sam… how am I gonna face him?  
> DEAN: What do you mean?  
> MARY: That yellow-eyed thing would never have come for him that night if I… I started all of this.

It’s not until 12x22 where she can say EVERYTHING, and even then, not TO Sam, but still to Dean, about her guilt.

> MARY  
> It’s not okay. Since I’ve been back, I know… I’ve been distant. Cold, even. Leaving you, working with them… I was trying to make things right. Just from a distance, because… being here with you was too hard. Seeing what I’d done to you and to Sam, I…  
> DEAN  
> Mom, what you did, the deal…everything that’s happened since has made us who we are. And who we are? We kick ass. We save the world.  
> MARY  
> I’m scared. What… What if he can’t forgive me?  
> (Sam walks into the room)  
> SAM  
> Mom. You don’t have to be scared of me.

I think Dean would have made her talk to him anyway and she was in a place where she’d been recovered enough *to* talk to him, having been made to see one of her sons in a clearer light already - in 12x02 after rescuing Sam she doesn’t open the conversation and Sam repeats the same sentiment without absolving her first, because he doesn’t KNOW she needs absolving. (For one thing, she already said sorry to him about this whole thing, you know, 12 years ago and all. And Sam had a whooole character arc to go through the trauma of her deal, come out the other side, and even get better in many ways, since it’s been SO long.)

She chooses to leave in 12x03 (which laid out perfectly in the mirrors how utterly traumatised she was by her deal and what had happened to Sam and Dean and explained to me exactly why she might not want to talk about it and need space. It was always about her deal and death, not just her memories of Heaven or abrupt leap forward in time, although neither HELPED her mental state). This is where ghost!Mary turns her back, and burning herself out to get rid of the poltergeist is her going to work with the BMoL.

And in the end she manages to express her deepest fear - the thing that kept her trapped on Earth as a ghost for 22 years - and she can voice it to Dean, and Sam hears, finally the thing she couldn’t say to him in THIS moment, and after that he can welcome her back into his life and she KNOWS that he understands, that he knows about her deal, that it doesn’t MATTER to him. And as I’ve been saying, that’s TRULY what Mary needed to free herself, from what I think was basically this ghost-stasis kind of feeling persisting all through season 12, as she was unable to face it and to therefore grow as a character, and to be let free to LIVE again.


	9. All Things Considered

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discussion of John Winchester in the context of alluded abuse /content warning

**1x14**

Another owed-to-past-me thing.

> SAM  
> Well, it coulda gone a whole other way after Mom. I little more tequila and a little less demon hunting and we woulda had Max’s childhood. All things considered, we turned out ok. Thanks to him.
> 
> DEAN  
> (Turning back to look at Max’s house) All things considered.

& 

> DEAN  
> Now then. I know what we need to do about your premonitions. I know where we have to go. 
> 
> SAM  
> Where?
> 
> DEAN  
> Vegas.   
> What? Come on man. Craps tables. We’d clean up!

I like this specifically because of the repeated use of 2 shots in the moment, of Dean turning away and then his face going into shadow, and then a shot of him IN shadow. (And, of course, shadow being used to conceal the truth, to hide a face, to turn it away into shadow is to turn away from the truth and that Dean’s face is SO expressive and vulnerable, looking away and having it concealed is such a brilliant way to tell US there’s something he’s not ready to share, and visually of course the imagery is just telling us that as well.)

The moment about John is far more ambiguous and comes first, while the second moment clearly shows that Dean is lying about being chill about Sam having psychich powers and joking around about it like it’s no big deal. The whole moment is more obviously staged, right down to the jaunty music ABRUPTLY cutting to the sad worried music in the last moment before the credits, making it very clear with a kind of “we’re manipulating you with the music so obviously even if you never normally think about these things it’s going to catch you by surprise” thing.

Once that’s established, you look 2 minutes back up the episode to Dean’s similarly shot understated reaction to Sam talking about how all things considered, John did a good job raising them. And it’s not just in Dean’s sniff and snarky reaction and all but that the show specifically stages 2 moments so close to each other where Dean looks like this, and does this, and the cameras change in this way, which shows us in one instance SO specifically EXACTLY what Dean is thinking about Sam’s powers and how not-pleased he is, while in the other it’s a little more nervous of outright condemning John, especially as Sam is talking about Max getting beaten (and I don’t think this sort of abuse was a feature of their childhood) but it’s still very very early in the show. Something Wicked does a good job setting up the danger and neglect and horrific expectations of their childhood and to explain why Sam sees it differently from Dean. And that this sort of emotional neglect and abuse is offered to us to explain Dean’s moment here.

(He was the one more defensive of their childhood in 1x01 when Sam was complaining about it, but he’s got a little more room to be honest here, without knee-jerk defending and Sam’s more rational discussion of what he THINKS their childhood was like in a calmer discussion allowing Dean the room to sniff his dissent.)

… Also yeah I know you could say he’s just looking around because he’s having another glance at Max’s house to reflect on what happened there in the first instance and obviously in the second he’s gonna close the door in a sec, but it’s the FRAMING and emotional similarity that gets to me. That we have these two moments right at the end of the episode where especially the 1st one they go to the trouble of the 2nd shot of his face like that in the middle of the dialogue, but with the 2nd in context, suddenly you have a close comparison between these two moments, and the second is much more obviously showing us that Dean is trying not to betray his own negative, miserable thoughts.


	10. Some Season 1 Thoughts On The Brothers’ Dynamic

The section of season 1 around the area of Asylum, Scarecrow, Faith, Route 666 and Nightmare mark a shift in Dean and Sam’s dynamic which I think is where they drew most of the angst and character tensions in the brother dynamic for the rest of the show. I’m interested in comparing it with 12x22 and that very specific message of Sam leading and Dean stepping back and letting him do it, which is a dramatic thematic change in their dynamic which essentially flips the one set up in the first season. And very specifically where that came from and how as a reversal of season 1 in some ways back to the pilot, Sam gets walked back out of what he gets walked into over these episodes.

Sam perpetually comes back to the sort of “you have to let me grow up” thought like in season 5 & 8 especially before season 12's different but similar focus. I think season 3 also contained some exploration of this in response to knowing Dean would die, and this did kick off the entire arc from 3-5. It’s been a lot of Sam’s lingering feeling about Dean and their dynamic hovering through the show after him, and in 12x22 we see another gesture which I don’t think (apart from the endless IMPLICIT trust of just working with Sam every friggin’ NORMAL day of the week treating him like an equal when this ISN’T a plot thing) we’ve had aside from Swan Song, in terms of Big Symbolic Okay You Are An Adult Now moments.

In the first part of season 1, Sam is with Dean to find John. And he passes it off as a road trip to anyone who asks, and John is the thing keeping Sam from just meeting up with him and they charge off father & son guns blazing revenge mission - he’s disappeared, and then sends them on another hunt when they catch up to where they lost him, also on a hunt he makes them take on his behalf, etc.

For a few episodes Dean can fob Sam off about going to work cases while they look for John but he already kinda knows, then at the end of Phantom Traveller it’s confirmed for them that John changed his answer phone to redirect to Dean, and the family business is now his. For Dean that’s just like, welp, I’ll shoulder THAT burden for my family too, no problem, already got a whole crushing weight there anyway hahaha. 

For Sam that makes it a lot more complicated, that John doesn’t WANT to be found and he’s now effectively trapped with Dean working the job while trying to convince him that finding John is more important, and Dean is convinced following John’s orders are more important.

Bloody Mary doesn’t have any real resistance to doing the case, and Sam’s preoccupied with visions and Jess’s death still, so I think his head is still spinning about what he’s actually doing and the case doesn’t help settle him AT ALL. In Skin, he’s the one who makes them backtrack for a personal thing which turns into a case, and he learns the crappy lesson that he can’t have normal friends and essentially sees that Dean feels like a friendless freak even if he pretends this is all cool and part of the job, but rather more focus on Sam as the rebellious child being dragged back into the awful family and his own sense of sacrificing normality for the job and revenge from his perspective (looking ahead to how this bubbles over). Hook Man, he offers token protests to doing the case while we start with him obsessing over finding John, and in Bugs it starts with Sam checking for cases in the newspaper while Dean hustles - we know from Bloody Mary Sam has Dean’s money and he really is freeloading as a road trip not just in what he keeps telling everyone, but that Dean is allowing him to stay at a careful remove from feeling like he’s actually just doing the job again.

Bugs also has all the good family stuff where we finally have Sam and Dean rehash the trauma of Sam leaving, as of course this is all open wounds to them because Sam left and they don’t see each other again until the Pilot, so this is a needed and much-delayed conversation directly addressing for the first time not just on screen but ever, between them about Sam going to college and how HE felt in the family, like the outcast who wanted to be normal, and he connects strongly with Matt, who is having similar issues with his dad that baffles Dean about why Sam relates to it so much. 

They’re still going over early childhood and Sam leaving for college issues in their dynamic and Sam really IS the kid brother on a road trip, and he is treated that way by the narrative in a lot of ways like this (also as in Sam sees this as a distraction and John and revenge is the real story/job/mission so hanging with Dean is as useful as road tripping. I don’t think it’s just a cute excuse he uses over and over), probably up to Home, where it all starts getting more personal and real. 

Sam gets to see Mary with his own eyes for the first time, and they have a bit more of a sense of being in it together and Sam being inducted into the family mythos, revisiting stuff that was very very abstract to him, and for a multitude of intents - writerly from the show and from Chuck and his “narrative symmetry” and the motives from the demons who conspired to kill Jess, that needed to happen to Sam to make it more real to him (in the same way Dean felt all along about Mary dying because that pain didn’t go away just because it had been a long time. The point is NOT what Sam says that Dean doesn’t know how it feels - it’s that SAM didn’t but it’s fresh and awful and despite growing up surrounded by grief, fancy learning coping mechanisms from John? Hence, follows in his footsteps, revenge-obsessed).

Asylum changes their dynamic now - Sam is beginning to be openly frustrated even before John sends them a case that Dean’s dragging him around on the job when they should be getting revenge, and I think he’s now still sort of road tripping until the end of the season because of his speech in Shadow about being a person again, and the flip only being demonstrated in 2x02 that he now is the one more dedicated to hunting and doing the job. 

And during Asylum Sam vents to the psychiatrist under the guise of complaining about his road trip, presumably similar stuff but less obviously leading to murder than what he yells at the end, and there’s a whole thing with him being annoyed the kids think Dean is his boss. The fight continues in Scarecrow with Dean standing up for being a good soldier - I mean son - and Sam stomps off to find John. 2 episodes in a row he uses the road tripping excuse to vent about being stuck in close quarters with Dean bossing him around when he meets Meg and vents to her as well, but he has his realisation about family when Dean is in trouble and goes back.

After that he’s immediately smacked with Faith, which is the first challenge one of them has of the other dying, and to which Sam has to save Dean at any close. His characterisation in this whole first chunk reminds me of season 10 Sam a great deal as I’ve recently rewatched it too (he has a “where’s my brother!?” line in Skin which has like, the exact same delivery as 10x01’s opening, among other little things which stood out to me) but this one episode in particular… Because he does save Dean, at a great cost, even having some very ominous-for-season 10 discussion about the evil black magic spell book and the desperation of Sue-Ann to bring Roy back, all of which made me laugh bitterly when I came through here on my post-season 10 rewatch, because it was pretty much word-for-word Sam’s season 10 all in one episode.

I think it’s interesting Sam is the first one to make an ethically dubious/bad choice to save Dean (dubious since he didn’t know it was bad, bad because he doubled down on it after - also looks much worse with at least 10 more years of canon rather than in the immediate moment it’s just a bit edgy :P) while in season 2 Dean saves Sam selflessly and after a whole season of feeling brought back against the natural order (something I think is only exacerbating how he already felt since Faith and finding out what Sam did for him). 

I think this is a way to tie Sam deeply into the family and make him prove he’d go so far for Dean after all his rebellion and anger at Dean, with Dean represented as the boss and the good son/older brother, that Sam isn’t actually going to really stomp off any time soon. He takes several strong lessons in a row about family and reconciliation, starting with the mirror family in Bugs and like, every episode after that except in Asylum because it abuts Scarecrow and is an ongoing emotional arc one starts and the other resolves, again proving to Sam he was wrong and being with Dean and doing the job is more important than revenge. (For now - he still has this choice all season and makes a false analysis for easy conclusion to the story by the writers that Dean’s all he has left and he doesn’t know where John is, even though they only just talked to John for the first time to get solid proof he’s alive, AND Sam thought he knew where he was for the first time as well and only didn’t go there because of going back to help Dean).

That all shifts Sam’s dynamic from a fairly equal partnership, where Sam was kind of along for the ride, but without being strictly tied into the family business because he was road tripping, he was basically like… a support hunter Dean took with him to not work alone, just, you know, the best hunter Dean knew for the job :P And that changes after the midseason to really make Sam duct-taped firmly back into the family business. But once he’s there, Dean goes from equal partner to older brother who is ALSO his boss in Sam’s eyes (even though Dean’s really just desperately following John’s orders, and is the one fighting in general for the family business to continue, in an a-political way about Sam’s role in it, just that Sam sees him deciding things and feels like it is Dean ordering him around… They have issues about it, basically :P), and once Sam reconciles with THAT he does ethically sketchy stuff to save Dean and doesn’t regret it, which is more of a blood pact thing to reaffirm commitment and loyalty.

In Route 666 Dean calls the shots, and Sam plays a trust game with the church thing so they both get in a power play of sorts and Sam teases Dean the entire time about Cassie…

And in Nightmare, Sam’s back to a sort of subordinate role in the power dynamic because he has to prove to Dean his visions are real (I think Dean totally believes him he just really really badly doesn’t WANT them to be real but it means Sam spends the first 10 minutes needlessly arguing his case wanting to be believed) and then at the end Dean coddles him with a protective you’ve got me you’ll be fine speech, which again puts himself in the role of protector to Sam.

I feel like from here on out their dynamic is hashed out a bit more firmly with all these specific things having happened in relation to all the main arcs - Sam’s powers, the family business, John, Sam n Dean, saving each other from death, the whole lot, which as I said up the top, OBVIOUSLY day-to-day they still act very equally and usually, unless plot reasons, have 100% equal trust on cases and work side by side very well. But long-term, I can see a LOT of character stuff settling on Sam that becomes his pattern of thinking (e.g. the stuff in Asylum & Scarecrow especially betraying how he feels as the younger brother being bossed around) that in the first handful of episodes at least up to Home wasn’t an issue or a part of their dynamic and they were going for a brothers on a roadtrip vibe without a lot of these Dire Obligations or Life And Death Pacts and so on.

I think Sam hasn’t really been able to get out of this because season 5 was supposed to resolve it, but season 6 and 7 have something constantly wrong with him until Cas fixes him for good, so Dean spends a great deal of Gamble era having to deal with each new thing that happens to Sam, frequently acting with power of attorney to fix him and get his soul back etc for his own good. Sam has a blissful free space in his life from 7x17-7x23 and got to work equally and fairly and without any massive interpersonal drama or whatever with Dean (though for most of season 7 after they reconcile say from 7x09 onwards they have one of their best dynamics with the least interpersonal drama once they let go the Amy fight), and then Carver takes over and gives Sam 1 more year or so of recovery off-screen only to smash it all up with a sledgehammer and regress him all the way back to how bad he was in 8x23… Which we’ve been recovering from for all the characters ever since.

Watching season 1 and knowing where Sam is going to be coming from in season 12 about his own personal growth and how HE views it, I can see some interesting stuff because a lot of season 1 is Sam VOICING how he feels about their dynamic, job and lives, because it’s the exposition season to get us involved in their lives and there’s a lot of telling and explaining hot they feel about this that and the other. Knowing how Sam says he didn’t want to lead and so on, his original issues with leadership was that he felt he had a mind of his own and Dean didn’t and he didn’t WANT to be bossed around by Dean, and to do his own thing. And season 1 subsumes him into the family business, and it leaves me thinking about the ever-relevant 10x05, and how the line about John in “The Road So Far” was that he took away their free will.

I sort of feel like watching season 1, you can see Sam giving ground over and over again in these fights. I know there’s more to come, but the important flip next is in 1x16 where it stops being Sam swinging against Dean’s position in the family, and goes back to Sam vs John, where it stays for the rest of the season and of course ending in 2x01 with John leaving them on a fight and 2x02 Sam having given himself over to the job and not really getting a break from then on to even dream of something normal until he hit a dog… 

So that’s all totally different territory in season 1 because there wasn’t much/any Sam vs John stuff in season 12 that I can think of (idk if sharp-eyed Sam fans caught a narrative about it I didn’t see making its way onto my dash), so I think I’ve watched the parts now which exposition most clearly how Sam ends up essentially following Dean into the family business and in the main arc stuff seeing himself as still being the kid brother being bossed around and made to do it somewhat against his will to have a normal life even if as I say, in general unless this point is being made, Dean rarely if ever acts like this towards Sam and Sam seems to have all the freedom he likes to call the shots in their dynamic because Dean will totally trust him with all the normal parts of their job without being precious about taking his lil brother into fights…

Obviously there’s a hell of a lot more intervening trauma and I think Carver era does a LOT to Sam to beat him down from a relatively balanced, happy-with-himself-and-the-universe place so to actually trace WHY Sam felt like he did in 12x22 you’d start at 8x01 and begin counting THERE, but looking at season 12 through a season 1 lens is really interesting to me.


	11. The Roots Of Season 9 In Season 1 or “The Things I’m Willing To Do”

****

****

****

****

> Sam: Yeah. (he looks at his brother) Hey, uh.... Dean, you, um...... you saved my life back there.
> 
> Dean: So, I guess you’re glad I brought the gun, huh?
> 
> Sam: Man, I’m trying to thank you here.
> 
> Dean: You’re welcome.
> 
> Sam walks across the room.
> 
> Dean: Hey, Sam?
> 
> Sam: Yeah?
> 
> Dean: You know that guy I shot? There was a person in there.
> 
> Sam: You didn’t have a choice, Dean.
> 
> Dean: Yeah, I know, that’s not what bothers me.
> 
> Sam: Then what does?
> 
> Dean: Killing that guy, killing Meg. I didn’t hesitate, I didn’t even flinch. For you or Dad, the things I’m willing to do or kill, it’s just, uh .... it scares me sometimes.
> 
> [Sam just looks at him, not knowing what to say.]

**1x22**

I’m watching 9x01 at the moment and so the themes of that season were weighing on me while I watched this… Hearing Sam rationalise the collateral damage as “You didn’t have a choice” just shows how far back the season 9 slogan of “I had no other choice” that’s repeated ad nauseam that season goes, and perhaps being that first time they really had to justify an action, subtly changes the course of their morality over the next few years…

Really though I’m mostly interested in Dean specifically, as we get so much “did what I had to do” but I don’t remember a whole lot of reflection on it in season 9 as he’s spiralling downwards. Dean goes right past that phrase here and gets to the words that should come after, of wondering WHY he has no other choice when it comes to such things and explores his own inner workings over this issue. He manages to name it as fear of himself – the response to keep his family safe and together and alive powers him all through season 1 as his main sort of motivation, and I don’t think, even how vulnerable and scared he was, he really began to feel reckless or suicidal until after John died, although of course he had the same conflict on a smaller scale in Faith, when one life of a random civilian weighed so heavily on him – because it was for him rather than this one random guy he had to kill on Sam’s behalf.

(Which I think makes them so fascinating because it’s not a blanket morality issue where they’re the heroes so they deserve special treatment by ethics and karma so they can kill people willy-nilly for the greater good… it still bothers them, and Sam sporadically has main arc stuff through the seasons of feeling bad about the meatsuit problem…)

Anyway it’s interesting here just because this ends up being the real darkness in Dean that season 1 explores – he seems aside from scared and obviously painfully loyal to John and to the concept of their family, and struggling with that, and struggling with this obligation in the same way he ends up struggling with the whole concept of free will as a whole by season 5… but the final episode of season 1 takes this moment to lift up the lid and show what for Dean is the worst direction these traits can take him, when he is backed into a corner and given what to him is a no-choice moment.

So of course to go back to 9x01, I’ve had it paused for the last couple of days on that scene where Dean has taken Gadreel in to see Sam for the first time, and he’s on that same precipice where his entire descent arc and all that follows from it starts from the things he’s willing to do to save Sam, with little time for self-reflection or hesitation… I think in a way it’s almost like Dean in this moment in season 1 can see ahead in a sort of hypothetical way to know that one day or another this thing that scares him about himself will finally break open and something huge and terrible will happen because of it… Almost like he knows this will lead to something as terrible as season 9’s descent even if he doesn’t know how or what. I’ve always hated hearing him say, in 9x10, how he thinks that he’s poison, but in a way, if he’s always scared of himself for this exact reason, for years before the narrative turns to focus on it as his darkest trait, I can see the straight line between those two scenes.


	12. Don't Ask Don't Tell

> **[waywardd](http://waywardd.tumblr.com/)**  asked:
> 
> Bi!Dean meta: idk if this has been said or not, but I haven't seen it. In s01e10, Sam was denying his demon powers and Dean says "don't ask, don't tell." That, of course, was the official US military service involving LGBT personnel. At the time of the episode, this policy was still very much in effect. Thoughts? 

* * *

Hi! :) 

Aw, season 1 stuff :D I’ve noticed that line before in this context and I think I’ve also seen people talking about it, somewhere, and I’ll go look in a moment. 

There’s some good meta out there about season 1 Sam’s queercoding via abstract magic powers contrasted with the very different form of queercoding for Dean via shit he says and does and circumstances and tropes etc. They both feel like freaks, which is said on screen for both of them by like 1x06, so you have Sam who is magically different from everyone else, and Dean who just feels socially ostracised and the metaphor works on a social level instead, which makes it more directly personal to his upbringing and why he doesn’t feel he connects just as a person. It’s part of the structural subtext of season 1 that lends to a bi!Dean reading ([like I was recently snarking in the tags of this post about](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/167171879258/mickmercury-prof-just-explained-how-gothic)) :D So I don’t think there’s any reason not to think that some sort of early bi!Dean subtext is out there in a sort of structural way which to me validates every reading of him taken off random lines and actions. And Dean going around saying stuff like that in season 1 is part of it :P

I… I just looked through my tag for the episode and couldn’t find anything, which is really weird because I *remember* having a conversation about it and/or reading good long meta about it. The only post I could find was this one which is not only one of 2 posts dealing with bi Dean stuff in this episode (aside from some slightly larger collections), I didn’t write much myself for this entire episode and the only reason it’s mentioned here is my tags snidely alluding to it:

[https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/137427332398/f-ckyeahfutbol-rainbofiction](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/137427332398/f-ckyeahfutbol-rainbofiction#notes)

I’m going to have to assume that this is such an obvious line we all just kinda don’t pay it any attention because like the one about him teasing Sam about the hotter psychic, you have to go through a few loops more than you need to with later subtext, even though it fully counts in a projection/anxiety way that Dean’s behaviour is quite predictable even by this point about in other ways.

Well I don’t think these are my own thoughts but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it talked about vis a vis Dean’s awareness of the concept and social commentary e.g. he’s calling Sam out for not wanting to talk about it because he is trying to say he’s NOT as unwelcoming as the military and would be supportive of Sam if he’d just talk to him normally about it instead of getting defensive. Especially since Sam brushes it off as weird vibes and dreams, when he previously, in Home, was much more certain he was having premonitions and was visibly distressed and beating himself up about having predicted Jess’s death. Dean’s not stupid, he’d have been waiting to find out what Sam was hiding since 1x04 and he knew Bloody Mary’s MO so of course he knows that to Sam this is more than “just” weird vibes and dreams, but he’s having some serious plot-arc, thing-that-killed-Mom-and-Jess weirdness going on right now. Sam blows him off talking about it and Dean snarks at him that fine keep your secrets if you think I’m going to - well, dishonourably discharge you from the family for the truth, to finish the parallel. 

Obviously Dean using the term critically means a level of social awareness to make the parallel and to use it as a negative concept. And then there’s the reflecting onto Sam, because the term obviously is *only* about being gay in the military as the first and only read you need to make of it in this context. And he barbs at Sam a lot for being feminine or gay or whatever in the early seasons, which is the negative side of the performing Dean thing: establishing that strength is one thing, that Dean doesn’t approve of these things, and that Sammy is instead, because obviously Dean’s the big manly older brother who’s never worn women’s underwear ever. Which just makes us go “oh hon” to Dean and try and steer him away from all these toxic masculinity related ideas of what he should be or not be. 

But anyway the projection and anxiety that you get with Dean is he says stuff but secretly he’s afraid of it and how it applies to him, and ribbing Sam like that is a fast way to reassert himself to the top of the masculinity ladder, but it turns pretty much everything he insults Sam with into an I’m rubber and you’re glue situation. Because at the heart of it Dean’s biggest issues are he’s scared and doesn’t have full control of the situation, and most of the first MotW episodes in season 1 have something or other where they absolutely expose Dean’s layers. [There’s some good recent comments](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/166987367248/early-performingdean) from [@wherethewildthingswerent](https://tmblr.co/mt-n-9w8wfX51yv1dgoU0AQ) who watching for performing!Dean rather than bi!Dean stuff and found a whole bunch of examples in the early episodes which prove that Dean NEVER had the facade for the audience. I think 1x03 or 1x04 pretty much immediately set us up to question Dean’s act anyways, like, the first 2 episodes are the only ones which are mostly about setting up the playing field and letting us know how this all works, and as soon as we are getting the idea of it, take it all away from Dean :P

I suppose the conclusion would be that Dean fears as much as what he’s jabbing at Sam about fearing - that would his family disown HIM for his queerness if they knew and from Sam’s POV almost the entire episode is Dean acting like John and following orders. Being HIS soldier and trying to do what John would want and earn his approval. John as their drill sergeant is something he eventually confirms to them in his own words, so the military references to how their family works, especially with John as an ex-Marine, are really important. 

That entire episode has John looming over it because he sends them to the case and Sam spends the first quarter expecting to meet John there, and then realises it’s been a distraction to send them away, while Dean is determined to work the case because John wants them to, and push Sam to do it no matter what as well. Hence the big outburst, and this episode leading directly into Scarecrow where they fall out completely for Dean not having a mind of his own and Sam wanting to get revenge instead of save people blah blah… Point being the idea about Dean there is he’s completely absorbed his own personality, wants and desires into being John, which isn’t even really called out and addressed until 3x10 when Dean’s demon!Dean dream self calls him out, and it takes further long years for any serious improvements to be made on Dean expressing himself, even if he’s begun to think for himself more after mentally grappling John’s ghost all of season 2, struggling with the orders, and finally being freed from that burden when they see his ghost move on in the sense of not being *directly under orders* any more, so he’s left to figure out the rest of his life how to be his own person or scuttle back into the safety of being John (and the timing of demon!Dean calling him out on that is pretty much because it’s season 3, John is dead and ALSO gone (which were 2 different events :P) and Dean’s still stuck in these things from back in season 1…)

It’s usually time to stop when the next paragraph would be summarising the rest of the show while making anguished Dean!girl noises. :D

—-

And although tbh this was badly stocked for this episode, if you’re wondering about bi Dean stuff in the show, I have collected this shockingly large collection of posts that you can start with - you can use the search function to skip to episodes:

<https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/164196287338/the-dean-is-bi-meta-masterpost-full-credit-to>

If I’m ever THAT bored for some reason I kinda want to change the links to descriptions of the meta but that is not currently something I am bored enough to do :D


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